The Toilers of the Sea (24 page)

But he did not need to make his mind up yet: he had plenty of time to think about it. The most difficult part was over. The main thing had been to strip Rantaine of his money and disappear with the Durande, and that had been accomplished. The rest was simple. No obstacles now lay ahead; there was nothing to fear; nothing could go wrong. He would swim to the coast, arrive at Pleinmont after dark, climb the cliff, and make straight for the haunted house. He would have no difficulty in getting into the house with the help of the knotted rope that he had hidden in a crevice in the rock, and would find there his traveling bag containing dry clothes and provisions. He could wait there in comfort, knowing that within a week Spanish smugglers—probably Blasquito—would put in at Pleinmont, and at the cost of a few guineas he would be conveyed, not to Torbay, as he had said to Blasco to conceal his real intention, but to Pasajes or Bilbao. From there he would go on to Vera Cruz or New Orleans. But now it was time to take to the water: the longboat was far away, an hour's swim was nothing to him, and here, on the Hanois, he was only a mile from the mainland. At this point in Clubin's reflections a gap opened up in the fog, and he saw the dreaded Douvres reef.

VII

AN UNEXPECTED TURN OF FATE

Clubin gazed wildly at the reef. It was indeed these terrible isolated rocks.

It was impossible to mistake their misshapen outline. The twin Douvres reared up in all their hideousness, with the passage between them like a trap, a sinister back alley of the ocean. They were quite close. They had been concealed by their accomplice, the fog.

In the fog Clubin had been on the wrong course. In spite of all his care he had suffered the same fate as two great navigators—González, who discovered Cape Blanco, and Fernández, who discovered Cape Verde. The fog had led him astray. It had seemed to serve him well in the execution of his project, but it had its dangers. He had changed course toward the west, but this had been a mistake. The passenger from Guernsey, claiming that he had recognized the Hanois, had led Clubin to change direction, in the belief that he was heading for the Hanois.

The Durande, wrecked on a sunken reef near the main rock, was only a few cable-lengths from the two Douvres.

Some two hundred fathoms farther away was a massive cube of granite. On the steep rock faces could be seen grooves and projections that would make it possible to climb to the top. The straight, right-angled corners of these rugged walls suggested that there might be a level area on the summit.

This was the Homme, which was still higher than the Douvres. The platform on the top overlooked their inaccessible twin peaks. This platform, crumbling at the edges, had a tablelike surface and a kind of sculptural regularity. It was a place of the utmost desolation and menace. The waves coming in from the open sea lapped placidly against the square sides of this huge black block of stone, which seemed a kind of pedestal for the huge specters of the sea and the night.

There was a great stillness: scarcely a breath of wind, scarcely a ripple on the sea. Under the silent surface of the water could be sensed the teeming life in its hidden depths.

Clubin had frequently seen the Douvres from a distance, and he was sure that that was where he was. There was no room for doubt.

It was sharp and devastating change of fortune. The Douvres instead of the Hanois; instead of a mile from land, five leagues. Five leagues of sea was an impossible distance for a swimmer. For a man shipwrecked and alone the Douvres are the visible and palpable presence of his last hour. From here there is no way to reach land.

Clubin shuddered. He had, by his own act, brought himself into the very maw of darkness.

There would probably be a storm in the course of the night, and the boat from the Durande, overloaded as it was, would founder. No news of the wreck would reach the mainland. No one would even know that Clubin had been left on the Douvres. There was nothing before him but death from cold and hunger. His seventy-five thousand francs would not bring him a mouthful of bread. All his carefully contrived plans had ended in this disaster. He had labored to bring about his own catastrophe. There was no way out, no hope of salvation.

His triumph had become a precipice. In place of deliverance, capture. In place of a long and prosperous future, he was faced with death. In a moment, in a lightning's flash, the whole structure he had built up had collapsed. The paradise that this fiend had dreamed of had taken on its true aspect: it was a tomb.

Meanwhile the wind had risen. The fog, driven before it and torn to pieces, was rapidly disappearing over the horizon in great shapeless masses. The whole expanse of the sea could now be seen again.

The cattle in the hold, with water flowing in ever faster, were continuing to bellow.

Night was approaching, and probably also a storm.

The Durande, lifted by the rising tide, was swinging from right to left and then from left to right and was beginning to turn on the reef as if on a pivot. It could not be long before a wave swept it off the rock and cast it adrift.

It was now not so dark as when the vessel had struck the rock. Although it was later in the day, the air was clearer. The fog in its retreat had carried off some of the darkness. There was not a cloud in the sky to the west. Twilight brings with it a vast white sky, and this was now lighting up the sea.

The Durande had run aground sloping downward toward the bow. Clubin went up to the stern, which was almost clear of the water, and stared fixedly at the horizon.

It is characteristic of hypocrisy that it clings persistently to hope. The hypocrite is always waiting for something to turn up. Hypocrisy is a vile form of hope, and the falseness of the hypocrite is based on that virtue, which in him has become a vice.

Strangely, there is a certain confidence in hypocrisy. The hypocrite trusts in some obscure element in the unknown that permits evil.

Clubin looked out on the expanse of sea. The situation was desperate, but this sinister being was not. He said to himself that after the long period of fog, vessels that had been lying to or at anchor would be resuming their course and that one of them might pass within sight of the rock.

And a sail did appear on the horizon, traveling from east to west. As the boat drew nearer Clubin could make out its rig. It had only one mast and was schooner-rigged. The bowsprit was almost horizontal. It was a cutter.

In half an hour it would be passing close to the Douvres. Clubin said to himself: “I am saved!”

At a moment such as Clubin was experiencing a man at first thinks only of the prospect of life.

The cutter was perhaps a foreigner. Might it not be a smuggler's boat heading for Pleinmont? Might it even be Blasquito himself? In that case not only would his life be saved but his fortune as well; and his stranding on the Douvres, by bringing a quicker end to his predicament, by cutting out the period of waiting in the haunted house and by concluding his adventure out at sea, would turn out to have been a stroke of luck.

All Clubin's former certainty of success returned. It is curious how ready villains are to believe that success in their enterprises is no more than their due.

There was only one thing to be done. The Durande, aground amid the rocks, mingled her outlines with theirs and was difficult to distinguish from them. In the little daylight that remained she might not be visible to the vessel that was approaching. But a human figure on the summit of the Homme, standing out in black against the wan twilight and making distress signals, would certainly be seen, and a boat would be sent out to pick up the shipwrecked mariner.

The Homme was only two hundred fathoms away. It was an easy swim, and the rock was not difficult to climb.

There was not a moment to be lost.

Since the bow of the Durande was caught in the rock, it was from the stern, where Clubin was standing, that he would have to dive into the sea. He took soundings, and found that there was plenty of depth under the stern. The microscopic shells of foraminifera and polycystinea picked up by the tallow on the sound were intact, indicating that there were underwater caverns in which the water was always calm, however rough the sea might be on the surface.

He undressed, leaving his clothes on the deck. He would be able to get something to wear on the cutter. He kept only his leather belt.

When he had stripped he took hold of the belt, buckled it on again, checked that the iron box was still there, took a quick glance at the direction he would have to take through the rocks and the breakers to reach the Homme, and dived head first into the sea.

As he was diving from a height, he went deep, touched bottom, briefly skirted the underwater rocks, and then kicked off to return to the surface.

At that moment he felt something catching hold of his foot.

I

THE PEARL AT THE FOOT OF THE PRECIPICE

A few minutes after his brief conversation with Sieur Landoys, Gilliatt was in St. Sampson.

He was troubled and anxious. What could have happened?

St. Sampson was buzzing with talk like a hive of bees that had been disturbed. The whole population was at the doors of their houses. Women were talking excitedly. Some people seemed to be relating some event, with much gesticulation, to groups of listeners. The words “What a misfortune!” could be heard. On some faces there were smiles.

Gilliatt did not ask anyone what was the matter. It was not in his nature to ask questions; and in any case he was too upset to speak to strangers. He mistrusted secondhand accounts, preferring to know the whole story at once. He made straight, therefore, for Les Bravées.

His anxiety was such that he was not even afraid to enter the house. In any case the door of the ground-floor room opening off the quay was wide open and there was a swarm of men and women on the threshold. Everyone was going into the house, and he went in with them.

Standing at the door was Sieur Landoys, who whispered to him:

“You know now what's up, I suppose?”

“No.”

“I didn't want to shout the news to you on the road. You don't like to be like a bird of ill omen.”

“What has happened?”

“The Durande is lost.”

There was a crowd in the room, with knots of people speaking in low voices as if they were in a sickroom.

All these people—neighbors, passersby, busybodies, anyone and everyone—were huddled near the door, as if afraid to go any farther, leaving clear the far side of the room, where Déruchette was sitting in tears, with Mess Lethierry standing beside her.

He had his back to the rear wall. His seaman's cap came down over his eyebrows. A lock of gray hair fell on his cheek. He was silent. His arms hung motionless by his sides; his mouth seemed to have no breath left. He looked like some inanimate object that had been set against the wall.

He had the air of a man within whom life had collapsed. With the loss of the Durande he had no longer any reason for his existence. His soul lived at sea, and now that soul had foundered. What was left to him now? To get up every morning and go to bed every night.

He would no longer be able to watch for the Durande, no longer see her leaving the harbor, no longer see her returning. What would the rest of his life be worth without an object? He could eat and drink; but beyond that, nothing. This man had crowned his life's work with a masterpiece, and his efforts had brought about progress. Now this progress had been destroyed, and the masterpiece was dead. What was the use of living on for a few more empty years? There was nothing left for him to do. At his age a man cannot start life again; and now, too, he was ruined. Poor old fellow!

Déruchette, sitting weeping on a chair beside him, held one of his hands between her two hands. Her hands were joined; his fist was clenched. It was an expression of their different sorrows. In joined hands there is hope; in a clenched fist, none.

Mess Lethierry had abandoned his arm to her to do as she pleased with it. He was completely passive. He had only the small quantity of life that might be left to a man struck by a thunderbolt.

There are certain descents into the abyss that withdraw you from the world of the living. The people coming and going in your room are confused and indistinct; they are close to you but make no contact with you. To them you are unapproachable; to you they are inaccessible. Happiness and despair do not breathe the same air. A man in despair participates in the life of others from a great distance; he is almost unaware of their presence; he has lost any consciousness of his own existence; he is a thing of flesh and blood but feels that he is no longer real; he sees himself only as a dream.

Mess Lethierry had the look of such a man.

The people in the room were whispering among themselves, exchanging such information as they had about the catastrophe. This was the substance of the story:

The Durande had been wrecked on the Douvres in the fog on the previous day, about an hour before sunset. All those on board with the exception of the captain, who had refused to leave his ship, had escaped in the ship's boat. A southwesterly squall that blew up after the fog lifted had almost brought them to shipwreck a second time and had driven them out to sea beyond Guernsey. During the night they had had the good fortune to encounter the
Cashmere,
which had picked them up and brought them to St. Peter Port. It was all the fault of the helmsman, Tangrouille, who was now in prison. Clubin had behaved nobly.

The pilots, of whom there were many among the groups of people, had a particular way of pronouncing the name of the Douvres. “A bad port of call,” said one of them.

On the table were a compass and a bundle of papers—no doubt the compass and the ship's papers that Clubin had handed to Imbrancam and Tangrouille when the ship's boat left the wreck. They were evidence of the magnificent self-denial of a man who thought of saving even these bits of paper at a time when he was remaining on the wreck to die—a small detail showing greatness of mind and sublime forgetfulness of self.

All those present were unanimous in admiring Clubin, and unanimous also in believing that he might yet be safe. The cutter
Shealtiel
had arrived a few hours after the
Cashmere,
bringing the latest intelligence. She had just spent twenty-four hours in the same waters as the Durande; she had lain to in the fog and tacked about during the storm. The skipper of the
Shealtiel
was among those present.

When Gilliatt arrived the skipper had just been telling his story to Mess Lethierry. It was a full and detailed account. Toward morning, when the squall had blown itself out and the wind had become manageable, he had heard the bellowing of cattle in the open sea.

Surprised by this rural sound amid the waves, he had headed in that direction and had seen the Durande aground on the Douvres. The sea was now calm enough to allow him to go closer. He had hailed the wreck, but the only reply was the bellowing of the cattle drowning in the hold. The skipper was sure that there was no one left on the Durande. The wreck had held together well, and in spite of the violence of the squall Clubin could have spent the night on board. He was not a man to give up easily; and since he was not on the Durande he must have been rescued. A number of sloops and luggers from Granville and Saint-Malo, getting under way again on the night before after the fog lifted, must certainly have passed close to the Douvres, and one of them must have picked up Captain Clubin. It will be remembered that the Durande's boat had been full when it left the wreck, that one man more would have overloaded it and perhaps caused it to sink, and that this must have been Clubin's main reason for staying on the wreck; but, having thus done his duty as captain, when a rescue ship appeared he would certainly have made no difficulty about taking advantage of it. You may be a hero, but you are not a fool. For him to commit suicide would have been absurd, particularly since he had nothing to reproach himself with. The guilty man was Tangrouille, not Clubin. This all seemed conclusive. The skipper of the
Shealtiel
was clearly right, and everyone expected Clubin to reappear at any moment. There was talk of giving him a triumphant reception.

Two things seemed certain from the skipper's account: Clubin was saved, and the Durande was lost.

As for the Durande, it had to be accepted that the catastrophe was irremediable. The skipper of the
Shealtiel
had seen the final stage of the shipwreck. The jagged rock on which the Durande was impaled had held on to her throughout the night, resisting the violence of the storm as if it wanted to keep her as its prey; but in the morning, when the
Shealtiel,
having ascertained that there was no one on board to be saved, had begun to move away, there had come one of those sudden heavy seas that are like the last angry outbursts of the storm. The Durande had been lifted violently upward, torn off the reef, and thrown, with the speed and directness of an arrow, between the two Douvres rocks. There had been a “devil of a crash,” said the skipper of the
Shealtiel.
The Durande, raised higher by the wave, had lodged between the two rocks as far as her midship frame. She was again held fast, but more firmly than on the underwater reef. She would remain haplessly suspended there, at the mercy of the wind and the sea.

The Durande, according to the crew of the
Shealtiel,
was already three parts broken up. She would certainly have sunk during the night had she not been caught up and held on the reef.

The skipper of the
Shealtiel
had examined the wreck through his glass and reported on its condition with seamanlike precision. The starboard quarter had been stove in, the masts snapped off, the sails blown off the bolt ropes, the shrouds torn away, the cabin skylights crushed by the falling of a yard, the uprights broken off level with the gunwale from abreast of the mainmast to the taffrail, the dome of the cuddy house beaten in, the chocks of the longboat struck away, the roundhouse dismantled, the rudder hinges broken, the trusses wrenched off, the bulwarks demolished, the bitts carried away, the cross beam destroyed, the handrail gone, the sternpost broken. All this devastation had been caused by the frenzy of the storm. Of the derrick on the foremast nothing at all was left; not a trace; it had been completely swept away, with its hoisting tackle, its blocks and falls, its snatch block and its chains. The Durande had broken her back; the sea would now begin to tear her to pieces. Within a few days there would be nothing left of her.

Remarkably, however, the engines of the Durande had remained almost unscathed—proof of the excellence of Lethierry's work. The skipper of the
Shealtiel
was sure that they had not suffered any serious damage. The masts had given way, but the funnel had held firm. The iron guards on the bridge had merely been twisted. The paddle boxes had been damaged; the casings had been crushed, but the paddle wheels had apparently not lost a single blade. The engines themselves were intact. The skipper of the
Shealtiel
was sure of it. Imbrancam, the stoker, who had mingled with the groups, was equally sure. This Negro, more intelligent than many whites, was a great admirer of the engines. He held up his arms, with black fingers spread wide, and said to Lethierry, who still stood silent: “Master, the machinery is still alive.”

Since Clubin was thought to be safe and the hull of the Durande was known to be lost, conversation in the various groups turned to the engines. People were as concerned about them as if they had been a person. They were amazed by how well they had performed. “There's a stout old lady for you!” said a French seaman. “She's a good one!” said a Guernsey fisherman. “There must be good stuff in her,” said the skipper of the
Shealtiel,
“to get away with two or three scratches.”

Gradually the engines came to be the sole subject of conversation. There were warmly held views both for and against them; they had their friends and their enemies. Some of those present—owners of good old-fashioned sailing cutters who hoped to win back customers from the Durande—were not sorry to hear that the Douvres had put the new invention out of action. The whispering grew louder and the discussions threatened to become noisy. In general, however, conversation was restrained, and every now and then there was a sudden lowering of voices, shamed by Lethierry's sepulchral silence.

The general view that emerged from the discussions was this. The essential thing was the engines. The ship could be rebuilt; the engines could not. The engines were unique. There would not be the money to make others like them; nor would there be anyone to make them; their original builder was dead. They had cost forty thousand francs, and no one would now risk that amount of money in such a venture. Moreover, it had been shown that steamships could be lost like any other vessel; the accident to the Durande had wiped out all her earlier success. But it was terrible to think that this piece of machinery, still entire and in good condition, would be torn to pieces within five or six days as the ship had been. So long as it existed the shipwreck could not be said to be complete. Only the loss of the engines would be irreparable. Saving the engines would make good the disaster.

It was easy enough to talk of saving the engines; but who would do it? Was it indeed possible? To conceive a project and to carry it out are two different things: it is easy to have a dream but difficult to turn it into reality. And if ever a dream was impracticable and senseless it was this one—to save the Durande's engines, aground on the Douvres. To send a ship and crew to work on these rocks would be absurd; it was not to be thought of. It was the time of year when there were heavy seas; and in the first squall the anchor chains would be sawn through by the sharp edges of the underwater reef and the ship would go to pieces on the rocks. It would be sending a second wreck to the aid of the first. In the cavity on the summit of the rock on which the legendary shipwrecked mariner had died of hunger there was barely room for one man. In order to salvage the engines, therefore, a man would have to go to the Douvres, and he would have to go alone— alone in that waste of sea, alone in that solitude, alone at five leagues from the coast, alone in that place of terror, alone for weeks at a time, alone in face of dangers both foreseen and unforeseen, without hope of receiving supplies if his food ran out, without help in any emergency, without any trace of human life apart from the memory of the seaman who had starved to death there, without any other companion than the dead man. And how would he set about saving the engines? He would have to be not only a seaman but a smith as well. And what hardships he would have to put up with! Any man who ventured on the task would be more than a hero: he would be a madman. For in certain enterprises of disproportionate magnitude in which superhuman power is called for, there is a higher level above bravery—madness. And indeed would it not be folly to devote so much effort to the recovery of a collection of old iron?